


The More Things Change

by invizig0th



Category: True Detective, True Detective (Season 1)
Genre: Alcohol, Fluff and Angst, High School AU, Homophobic Language, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Rust's dad is doing his best but his best is not very good, Teacher-Student Relationship, non sexual though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-11 14:51:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7896880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/invizig0th/pseuds/invizig0th
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rust and his father move from Alaska to Louisiana. Rust reads a lot of Nieztsche, gets a lot of detention, joins the track team, quits the track team, processes trauma, and finds some healthier coping mechanisms.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The More Things Change

The Alaskan wind rattles at the door and windows like it’s trying to break into their cabin. Rust pulls himself deeper under the quilts heaped on top of the twin mattress he shares with his father. It’s no use. This is a bone-deep cold, freezing him from the inside out. Rust tries to move himself closer to the old man for body heat, but the other half of the bed is empty.

Rust sits up. His heart pounds. His father is a goddamned idiot. If he’s out in this storm, he’s as good as dead. And if he took the truck, then Rust is as good as dead, too, stranded in the only cabin on this side of the lake. He grabs his lighter from off the bedside table and lights a kerosene lantern. The weak light sputters, then steadies, and he sees his father sitting on the wooden floor. He is dressed in cold-weather hunting gear and surrounded by cardboard boxes. Rust watches his father packing canned fruits and vegetables. His father looks up as he reaches to take more cans off the rough-hewn shelf - one of the few pieces of furniture in their one-room cabin. 

They lock eyes. Brown, narrowed, deep-set and dark-circled. There’s no denying the relationship. Rust blinks first. 

“You gonna sit there or you gonna help?” His father says.

Rust gets out of bed and pulls on his boots and his dad’s old flak jacket. Nights this cold, he sleeps in jeans and layers of sweaters. He moves to start up the fire in the wood-burning stove, but his father tells him not to bother with it.

“Just help me load up the truck.”

Rust nods, hefts a box of dishes and cookware, and goes out into the storm.

The snow lets up by the time they’ve reached Tetlin Junction, and the sun begins to rise halfway through Yukon. “Where’re we going?” Rust asks the first time they stop for gas at a little ma-n-pop filler station.

“Well,” his father says, and there’s a pause that feels as wide as the Alaskan wilds. “I was thinkin’ somewhere warm.” 

Rust knows there’s no use in asking any one of the million other questions running through his head: what about the cabin, what about the rest of the things they left in the cabin, what about school, what about money, what about Rust. Why are they moving, why didn’t he tell Rust they were moving, why didn’t he wake Rust up. Was he trying to leave Rust? Is he still trying to leave him? Rust is silent as they continue driving through Canada. He watches the road and picks at the skin on the inside of his arms until he gets blood onto the upholstery and his dad takes a hand of the wheel to smack him.

They eat granola bars, canned vegetables, and elk jerky, and sleep parked in frozen campgrounds. Rust tries to turn on the radio, but his father launches into a tirade about the CIA’s encoded messages for mind control that leaves them both shaking. They make it through customs and back into the US with no problems, the unregistered shotgun hidden under the quilts in the back. Rust almost wishes they were pulled over for questioning, just so’s he’d get to talk to someone.

Rust knows his dad isn’t all ok, but he’s not sure which parts of him are ok and which aren’t. Sometimes his dad screams in his sleep. It wakes up Rust. Rust thinks this is a not-ok part, but it’s hard to be sure. Lying awake at night, listening to the wind and wolves and his father, it seems like opening your throat and letting loose is how everything strong and sharp survives. His dad claims to know a lot of things, things that they don’t teach in the Alaskan village’s one-room schoolhouse, like how to make a poultice that will drive out fever and infection, and how to jumpstart a frozen truck, and how to keep the government men from tracking him down. Rust isn’t sure his dad knows everything, but Rust’s arms healed, and the truck still runs, and the g-men never showed up at their cabin, so then again, maybe his dad is right about everything.

Rust starts reading when they hit Montana. His scabs have opened up again. This is how he thinks -- as if the blood wells up out of his skin all of it’s own accord, like scarlet Indian paintbrushes that grow wild in Texas. Not that Rust can remember anything about Texas, but he’s seen pictures. His dad notices the blood and skin underneath Rust’s nails, and gives him a dark look. The next time they stop to piss, Rust gets the six books his dad owns out of the back of the truck. He doesn’t much like reading, but he likes getting hit even less, and books can at least help take his mind out of his body. 

He gets through his dad’s three Tom Clancy novels in two days, then goes through two thin books -- one called  _ The Stranger  _ by a French guy he’s never heard of, and one about an old fisherman that’s missing a cover. By the fifth day of their journey, he’s on the last book -  _ Beyond Good and Evil _ , by Nietzsche. Rust is a solid C student in English, so he’s pretty sure he’s not understanding everything, but he understands enough to know that these ideas are more powerful and real than anything he’s ever read. 

When it gets too dark to read, he tries to imagine the sort of person his dad used to be. Why’d he buy these books, why’d he kept them. Those six books have sat on his dad’s shelf since Rust can remember, but his dad’s never so much as touched them. Their conversations about life before Rust was born are limited and circular. “If I had known about this when I was in the army, I never woulda let them send me to Nam,” he would say at least once a month while Rust helped him to decontaminate their drinking water. “They got this chemical, see, they spray it from planes and it gets inside the rivers and run-offs and damages your brain so you don’t feel like saying no to anything no more. You’re one lucky sonuvabitch, Rust. They’ll never get you. Man, I sure as hell wish someone told about them when I was a kid. Never woulda gone to Nam. You understand me?” And Rust would nod, and help his father move the cask of cleaned, boiled water into the corner of the room, and understand nothing. 

They keep driving south, so far south now that they can sleep comfortably on quilts beneath the stars instead of bundled up in the truck. Rust wonders how far they’re going. He’s only taken three semesters of Spanish, and got D’s each semester. He hopes his dad stops before they get to Mexico.

 

They stop in front of a shotgun-style house that one of Rust’s dad’s old war buddies owns in a small town outside of New Orleans. He’s sitting on the porch drinking a beer when they pull up. Rust’s dad greets him with a nod. The other man slaps him on the back. Rust begins unloading the truck, but the man on the porch calls him over.

“So this is Rustin Spencer, huh?” He says, holding Rust by the shoulders. “You look just like your old man.”

“Yessir,” Rust says. It’s hot as the devil, and humid, too. The man’s hands are sweaty and heavy on his shoulders.

“You know who I am?”

“Nossir.”

“Your old man didn’t tell you about me? Goddamn, kid, I’m the guy you were named after.”

“Rustin?”

“Naw, that was your mama’s idea. I’m Spencer. Jesus Christ, Cohle, I can’t believe you never told your kid about me. Jesus fuckin’ Christ.” He lets go of Rust. “You want a beer, Cohle, you ol’ sonuvabitch?” 

“Naw, I don’t drink no more,” Rust’s dad says. 

“Well, shit,” Spencer says. “You want some sweet tea?”

The men sit on the porch and get to talking while Rust empties the truck. 

“You don’t need to do that,” Spencer says, but Rust’s dad says to let the kid do it, he’s learning responsibility. There’s not that much to carry into the house anyway. 

As soon as Rust pulls open the screen door, he knows that this house will never feel like home. Home is the cabin he grew up in, where he knew every knot and whirl in the wood. Here, it smells like ash and aluminum, the dozens of people who had lived here before them and the cheap metal roofing. This place will never not feel temporary. Rust puts the cookware and what’s left of their rations in the kitchen, and leaves his dad’s things in the first bedroom. Rust takes the second, smaller bedroom for himself. He dumps his clothes in the dresser, and stacks his dad’s six books on top of it. Then he throws a quilt on the bare mattress and lays down. The ceiling fan spins above him, doing jackshit to dry up the sweat that’s got his shirt soaked through and his balls glued to his thighs. Rust runs his fingers over the smooth, cool white walls. The sunset streaming through the window paints the drywall in shades of gold, and glints off the only decoration, a bronze crucifix hung on the far wall. Rust listens to the whir of the fan and stares at the figure of the dying man until he falls asleep.

Spencer hangs around the house for another two days. Rust’s dad is more interested in putting aluminum foil over the windows and killing the roaches that live behind the kitchen cabinets than catching up and talking about the bad old days. Rust stays out of both men’s way. 

The house backs up to a bayou. There are a few boards nailed together to make a small dock where the water turns to mud, just big enough to support a white plastic chair. Rust leaves the house in the morning and spends all day reading on the riverbank. The shade of the Spanish moss doesn’t keep him from sweating. He peels off his shirt, and slides his feet into the stagnant, silty water. He stays outside until it’s too dark to read. At night, he lies on his mattress, scratching and pinching at the mosquito bites all over his body until they’re so red and puffy, it reminds him of being seven years old and sick with chickenpox.

The third day there, Spencer grabs Rust as he’s coming back from the bayou and asks if he wants a beer. Rust’s dad’s at the hardware store getting more boric acid for the roaches, so Rust says yessir and follows Spencer out to the porch. Spencer hands Rust a can of Bud Light and they both sit down on the porch swing. 

Rust’s never drunk alcohol before. He sips the beer cautiously. It tastes bitter, but the coldness is refreshing. Beside him, Spencer crushes his empty can. “Your daddy’s changed a lot since I knew him,” Spencer says as he pops the tab on another can.

“Yessir,” Rust says warily.

“When he wrote me, asking if you and him could crash with me, I thought, hell, Spence, I thought to myself, well if that ain’t a great idea. You see I been tryna get someone to rent this old place for over a year now. And I figured my old buddy would be just as good as anyone. We were together in Nam, you know, so I figured, if I can trust my buddy to keep the Cong from shooting me in the back, well, I can trust him to pay rent on time and not build a fucking meth lab in the garage.” He pauses and swigs his beer. Rust does, too. “Well, now I’m wondering if maybe that weren’t a mistake. You get what I’m saying?”

“Yessir.”

“Rent is two-fifty on the first of the month, ok? In case your daddy forgets.”

“Yessir.”

“You’re a good kid,” he says. “You want another beer?”

“Nossir, I’m alright.”

Spencer takes another drink for himself. “Yeah,” he says, standing up. “Well, I best be heading out now. Two-fifty, remember. First of the month.”

“Yessir. I won’t forget.”

“You’re a real good kid, Rustin Spencer.” Spencer ruffles his hair before he gets in his truck and pulls out of the gravel driveway.  

Rust pours the rest of his beer onto the grass and crushes the can.

 

The hot sun wakes Rust up early. He’s down by the water, an apple in one hand and Nietzsche in the other, when he hears a rumble from the road. He watches a faded yellow bus pause at the end of the dirt road, where a group of teens are standing. They get on the bus and it leaves in a cloud of diesel fuel. Rust’s been in the same school and class since he was a kid - just him, two white girls whose momma worked at the only bar in town, and some native kids. He was the oldest kid by five years, so he usually ended up sitting alone working out of textbooks while the teacher, an elderly man, worked with the little kids.

There used to be another girl. Dora. Rust didn’t like her. She was older than him but they still had to share textbooks. She worked so slowly that he’d have finished an exercise before she’d even gotten the first question done. Rust was always relieved when she wasn’t in school, which was often. Sometimes she’d miss three or four days and then be back. Rust wished she’d go away forever.  

Then, on a sunny day in March, their teacher had all the kids, even Rust, sit together on the rug in the front of the schoolroom. The teacher sat in his rocking chair and explained that Dora was dead. Said she broke her neck and died. Well, her neck was broken, Rust learned from his dad over dinner that night. But not after some sick sonuvabitch had his way with her and messed her up real good.

They had off of school that Friday for the funeral. Rust went. It was the first time he’d been in the church. To him, there was something real fucked up with holding a funeral for a teenage girl in a room full of paintings of saints smiling beatifically as they were flayed and burned and killed in all manner of ways. The pastor talked a lot of bull about how Dora had made the world a better place and was getting her heavenly reward. Rust felt the eyes of, if not the congregation, then at least the painted saints staring him down. They knew that -- somehow -- it was his fault that Dora was dead. 

Rust wonders if he’s even gonna have to go to school here. He is fifteen now, which is old enough to get a job.  His dad is real good at tracking and hunting, but Rust isn’t too sure there’s enough hunting here to make a living out of it. If Rust could get even a minimum wage job, working full time, he figures that’d still be enough to pay Spencer, and have some left over.

That night, at dinner, Rust’s father breaks the silence to announce that he got a job doing roofing with a local construction company. “They said what experience I had and I said, well, I built my own house and it kept me and my kid safe in Alaska for twelve years, and they said I start tomorrow,” he says proudly. “They’re good guys. No asking for signatures or paperwork, just a man’s honest word. Didn’t look like they were hiring too many wetbacks like some of those other foreigner-lovin’ types.” 

Rust pushes his chicken and green beans around on his plate. “You think they’d hire me?” he asks.

“What the hell are you talking about?” his father says.

“I was just thinking.”

“You’ve never built nothing in your life. What makes you think you can work building houses?”

Rust doesn’t mention that he’s helped his father do repairs on their cabin every spring since he could hammer a nail. “Well, maybe I could get a job somewhere else.”

“You think I can’t provide for us? What’s Spencer been telling you?”

Rust doesn’t reply. His father slams his fork and knife down on the table. The front door slams on his way out. The truck engine turns over, and Rust begins clearing the table.  

The next morning, Rust gets up, showers, and puts on his cleanest pair of blue jeans, an undershirt, and a long-sleeved plaid button-down. His dad’s shoes aren’t by the door, so  Rust assumes that he either left for work already or never came back last night. The latter possibility worries Rust, but not as much as it would have in Alaska. Here, at least, there are grocery stores and neighbors and jobs. He could survive alone, if he had to. He eats a peanut butter sandwich and packs another for lunch. 

Rust starts sweating as soon as he steps out of the house. His backpack is light - he only has the notebook he used at his old school, his lunch, and  _ Beyond Good and Evil _ \- but it’s enough to trap the sweat against the small of his back. He can’t believe he was ever cold in his life. 

When the bus pulls up, he’s surprised, and grateful, to find that it’s air-conditioned. Rust takes a seat near the front next to a older girl listening to her Walkman. He looks past her, out the window at the Louisiana countryside as the bus winds through the back roads, stopping in front of farm houses and mobile homes, until it reaches the high school. Rust is taken aback by the size of the school, and flushes. Here he is, in the deep fucking south, and he’s the one that feels like a hick redneck. He crosses his arms, pressing his nails into his biceps, and feels the warm, wet flow of blood from re-opened wounds.

Rust gets home at four in the afternoon. His backpack is loaded down with textbooks and papers from his teachers, plus all of the paperwork the lady at the front desk gave him to fill out. None of his teachers gave him real homework, just told him to try to catch up with the rest of the class. He spreads the textbooks out on the kitchen table while he waits for his dad to get home. Louisiana’s tenth grade curriculum isn’t so different from Alaska’s. To his disappointment, he’s still got to take Spanish.

His dad doesn’t get home until 1am, and when he does, he falls asleep on the couch almost immediately. In the morning, Rust scrawls his dad’s signature at the bottom of the forms. There’s a lot of blanks - what the hell  _ is  _ their street address? Their house just has a plastic ‘3’ tacked onto the mailbox - and N/As - mother’s name, mother’s occupation, home phone number - but at least the papers are signed. 

  
  


“But, Miss, that’s not true. Evolution is a theory accepted by the majority of the scientific community. It’s just as valid as the theory of gravity or -- or the theory of relativity,” a Black girl wearing purple overalls says. 

“Thank you for the opinion, Carrie Jane. Does anyone have anything else to add before we move on?” the science teacher says.

Rust feels lightheaded as he raises his hand.  Carrie Jane looks at him hopefully.

“Go ahead, Rustin,” the teacher sighs.

“Well,” Rust says. “I do think evolution is the only explanation for how we got here. It doesn’t explain why, though. But I think--” He pauses. Everyone in the class is staring at him, probably because up ’til now, no one’s gotten a word out of the new kid. His scabs itch. He wants to peel his skin off so they can see him as he is: a mass of atoms bound together but desperately wanting to break apart and dissipate into the atmosphere, becoming nothing and everything all at once. He forces his hands to be as still as if they were nailed to a cross. “ I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself--”

“I think that’s enough, Rustin,” the teacher says over him.

“--we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things--”

“Mr. Cohle! That is  _ enough _ !” 

“We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody.”

“That’s it, young man. You’ve just earned detention.” She holds out an bright orange slip of paper. Rust dutifully walks to the front of the room to accept it. His hand touches hers at he reaches out, and he looks up at her. Her face is wrinkled and sagging. Her makeup, applied eight hours ago, is smeared, as if her lips and skin and eyes were all blurring into each other. Rust is suddenly acutely aware of their shared humanity: the pathetic pinnacle of millennia of evolution. “Maybe-” he says, so soft that only she and the kids sitting in the front row can hear him. “Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight - brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.”

The biology teacher rips the detention slip out of his hand, scrawls something on it, and shoves it back into his hand. “Now you’ve got detention for a week.”

 

The only really bad thing about detention is that it’s in one of the trailer classrooms, out by the football field, which means there’s no AC. After his last class lets out, Rust walks out to the trailer. There’s four other kids there, one of whom he recognizes from his gym class. He hands the orange paper to the teacher standing at the front of the room and takes a seat at a desk.

“Alright, I see we got some new faces here, so let me go over the rules for y’all. For all y’all who don’t know me, I’m Mr. Hart and I want to be here about as much as you punks do,” the teacher says. “Y’all are gonna stay here for the next two hours. I don’t care what y’all do so long’s as it’s silent and y’all stay in your seats. Any questions? Alright.” Hart sets a timer on his desk, and opens a copy of last month’s  _ Guns & Ammo _ . 

Rust takes out a library book. He had skipped lunch today to check out the school library. The librarian had stared at him blankly when he initially asked if she had anything by Nietzsche. Then he showed her his dog-eared copy of  _ Beyond Good and Evil _ . 

“Oh,  _ Nietzsche _ ,” she said, pronouncing the name without voicing either ‘e’ or the ‘z’. Rust flushed, but she didn’t comment as she led him into the stacks and pulled out a book entitled  _ Twilight of the Idols _ . “This is all we have, I’m afraid. The school board cut rhetoric classes in the seventies, and since then, I’m sorry to say, there’s not been much demand for philosophic texts.” Rust thanked her and checked it out with his newly-issued student ID number.

The book pulls him in, and he keeps reading it as he walks the two miles back home. He’s still reading it, lying on his mattress, when his dad gets home that evening. He hears the front door slam shut, then the thump-thump-thump of his dad walking in work boots on the linoleum. It sounds louder than usual.

“Rustin!” His dad calls. “Get your ass in here!”

“Dinner’s in the fridge, Dad. Left overs, and I made some rice.”

“I said, get your ass in here! Don’t make me repeat myself a third time!”

Rust reluctantly dogears his current page in his book, and goes into the kitchen. His father is standing in the doorway, arms crossed.

“Son, I gotta question for you. Why did my boss get a call for me today, from your high school?”

Rust begins explaining how he got detention, but his father cuts him off.

“I don’t care if they make you stay after school every day until you graduate. What I do care about is how the fuck your high school got my name, and my boss’s name, and that phone number?”

“It was on the registration forms they gave me.”

“What forms? I didn’t sign any damn forms.”

“You didn’t have to sign them,” Rust lies. “They just wanted to know, like, how to contact you. For shit like this. But I didn’t give them the phone number. I didn’t, swear to god.”

“Jesus christ, Rustin!” His father shouts. “How the fuck did I raise a son so fucking stupid. What the hell were you thinking? Jesus  _ christ _ . I thought I taught you not to give out any information-”

“It was just your boss’s name-”

“And now they got a phone number for us, so don’t talk back to me!” His father shouts. Rust’s reflexes are good, and the first punch just glances off his chin, but he doesn’t have enough time to get his footing, and the second lands square in his face. Rust crumples, his hands instinctively clutching at his bleeding nose as his eyes fill with tears. He manages to get his back against the refrigerator and curls up, arms protecting his skull. His dad’s foot connects with his ribcage, once, twice, and a third time, and then he hears his father walking away and the front door slams.

Rust takes off his undershirt, balls it up, and presses it against his nose. After the flow of blood finally subsides, he tosses the shirt in the trash - there’s no getting that blood out of white cotton - then strips off the rest of his clothes and takes a shower. When he turns off the water, he can hear his father pacing around the house. His father is probably waiting to apologize. He always wants to apologize, afterwards, and the apologies are always laced with justifications. I only did this because I cared about you. I only did this because I want you to be safe. I only did this because if I don’t, the g-men will arrest us and what they’ll do will be so, so much worse. Rust turns the water back on. He stays in the shower until the hot water’s run out and his skin is clammy and wrinkled. Rust towels off his hair, then cautiously opens the bathroom door. He sees his father’s feet hanging off the end of the couch, and hears him softly snoring. Rust goes into his own room and silently locks the door behind him.   

 

Only two days after his first week of detention, Rust finds himself handed another orange slip as punishment for continually forgetting his math homework. It gets turned from one afternoon of detention into one week when Rust points out that there’s no reason for him or anyone to be studying algebra.

“What do you think the average IQ of this group is, huh?” he asks. 

“Just sit down, Cohle. I’m sure some of the students here would actually like to get on with the lesson.”

“It’s just observation and deduction. Looking around this room, I see a propensity for obesity. Poverty. I think it's safe to say nobody here's gonna be splitting the atom, you and me included.” 

“Not with that attitude, you won’t. Cohle, I don’t know what things were like at your old school, but here, you’re going to have to learn to respect your teachers and classmates. Try to think about that while you’re serving detention this week.”

 

“I just don’t get it,” Marty says. It’s a Friday afternoon, and he’s alone in the trailer with Rust. He wasn’t even supposed to be there, but someone had to babysit the repeat offender, and Principal Garaci doesn’t care that Marty’s supposed to be helping coach the track team right now. Marty leans against Rust’s desk. The kid doesn’t look up from his book. What the hell. This kid’s been reading the same goddamn book for three weeks now. It ain’t even that thick. Marty feels, irrationally, angry. “Hey, pay attention when an adult’s talking to you.”

Rust slowly looks up. “Yeah?”

“I said, I don’t get it. Why’re you in here every frickin day? I mean, you never make trouble in gym class. You’re from Canada, right?”

“Alaska.”

“Right, well, same thing. Are you, uh, having trouble adjusting to Louisiana?”

Rust presses against the inside of his arms. Wearing long sleeves five days a week has caused his skin to break out in heat rash. As the flannel rubs against his scabby skin, he winces at the combination of the familiar sharp, sore pains and unfamiliar hot, dry itching.

“Aw, come on. You can talk to me.”

“I don’t have anything to say to you.”

“Yeah, well, you had something to say to…” Marty checks Rust’s detention slip. “Ms. Simmons earlier this week.”

Rust rolls his eyes, but continues worrying at his wounds.

“Look, I’m not trying to be, uh, judgemental or nothing,” Marty says. “You seem like a good kid. Maybe you just need someone to talk to.”

“I’m the person least in the need of counseling in this entire fucking state.”

“Alright, geez, chill out. I’m just saying, you know, maybe you need an outlet.” While Marty waits for Rust to respond, he gets a spark of an idea. “Hey, you ever thought about joining a sports team?” He eyes the boy’s lean frame and long legs. “I reckon you’d be pretty good at track ‘n’ field.” 

“I’m not interested.”

“Just come watch practice. You don’t really wanna spend two hours in here instead of outside, do you?”

“Fine,” Rust concedes. “Only cause it’s so goddamn hot in here.”

Rust sits on the bleachers and watches the practice from behind his book. There’s eight boys total, split into groups of four and four. One group is doing sprints and hurdles, while the other group is running endless laps around the track. Rust figures the track is a quarter-mile. He watches and counts. The fastest boy in the group has a seven minute mile, and the last quarter of his mile takes nearly twice as long as the first quarter. He wonders how long the cross-country races are. He’s never ran track before, but he’d bet a hundred bucks that none of these boys ever had to carry an elk carcass six miles. 

Marty approaches Rust after the practice is over.

“So, what’d you think? We got a meet coming up at the end of the month and sure could use another long-distance runner.”

“Still not interested,” Rust says. 

After detention, Rust throws his backpack in his locker and runs home. It’s three and a half miles. By the end of it, he’s slick with sweat and his throat is coated with dust, but the muscles in his legs hardly ache at all. He pours himself a glass of water and looks at the timer on his watch. Twenty-three minutes. That’s not bad. He could probably do better.

Saturday morning, Rust gets up early. He pulls on gym shorts, a undershirt, and sneakers. As warm as it is this far south, it’s still winter, and the sun rises late. Rust casts no shadow as steps outside into the dark blue early morning. After a few stretches, he takes off running.

He isn’t running fast, but he doesn’t let his pace lag. The even rhythm of his sneakers slapping against the asphalt stands out against the syncopated cacophony of birds and insects coming from the bayou. Rust runs from his house, past the bait shop and the liquor store, across the train tracks, and through the town park. He pauses only for a moment, to drink from the water fountain in the park, and then runs the whole way back again. 

In the shower, he runs his hands over his thighs and calves, as if he could feel where his muscles had been strained and torn. His legs hurt, but it’s a good hurt. Almost a better hurt than when he tears at his skin. A deeper hurt. It’s not enough to keep him from peeling the wet, pulpy scabs off his arms when he gets out of the shower, but it is enough to keep him from opening new wounds.   

Rust runs that route every morning for the rest of the week. Running allows him to inhabit his body in a way he finds meditative. Necessity forces him to keep his breathing deep and steady and, perhaps by extension, his usual spiralling intrusive thoughts seem less intense and easier to deflect. By the end of the week, his legs don’t hurt anymore. Rust adds another mile to his route on Monday.

The extra mile takes Rust through the nicer neighborhood in town. As far as Rust is concerned, the whole town is a stinking, sweaty shithole, but in this neighborhood, people keep their lawns mowed and their front porches painted. Rust hardly notices these details. His mind is focused solely on the synchronized movements of his muscles. Left foot, right foot, inhale, exhale.

“Well, now, there’s an unexpected sight,” a familiar voice says.

Rust stops short, startled. Mr. Hart is standing on the driveway of a house only a few yards away from Rust. A young girl, no older than three or four, watches both of them from the porch.

“I thought you said you weren’t interested in running track,” Mr. Hart says, smiling.

“I’m not,” Rust says. He wipes sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. “And even if I was, my dad wouldn’t let me.”

“Aw, sure he would. I’ll talk to him.”

“He doesn’t want to talk to anyone.”

“Just come to practice tomorrow afternoon,” Mr. Hart cajoles. “I’ll even give you a ride home. We really need a long-distance guy for the meet next week.”

“I’ll probably have detention again by tomorrow afternoon,” Rust counters.

“You know, uh, it’s kinda tradition to excuse detentions for student athletes if there’s a game or a meet coming up. So whaddya say?”

“Fine,” Rust says.

“Great! That’s the attitude, son.” Mr. Hart claps Rust on the shoulder. “Say, Rust, are you ok there?” he asks, noticing the scabs and scars on the inside of Rust’s arms.

Rust crosses his arms and steps back. “Yeah, I’m fine. It’s just these damn mosquitoes.”

Mr. Hart laughs. “Yeah, those little bloodsuckers can mess you up real good. Well, I’ll see you at school.” 

“Yeah, see you,” Rust mutters.

 

The track team guys are ok, which is a lot better than Rust had expected, not that he’d ever admit it. Mostly, the guys leave him alone, which is fine by him. He shows up early on Tuesday afternoon in a t-shirt and gym shorts. The rest of the guys are hanging out on the bleachers, clustered around a boombox blaring an AC/DC tape, joking and wrestling with each other. Rust stands off to the side, uninterested in joining the group, and unsure if they’d even let him. 

Mr. Hart walks out on the field a few minutes later, and leads them through a series of stretches and warm-up exercises. Rust manages to do the same number of push-ups and crunches as the other guys, but just barely. He’s grateful, then, when he and the other long-distance guys take off running. Even though Rust didn’t react as quickly as the other guys to Mr. Hart’s starting whistle, he soon makes up the lost distance. Rust finishes the three-mile run yards ahead of everyone.

Mr. Hart clicks his stopwatch. “That’s nineteen-twenty!” He shouts, and fist-pumps the air.

“That’s a good time?” Rust asks. He takes a seat on the bleachers and chugs a water bottle.

“Are you retarded?” One of the guys waiting for his turn at the hurdles says. “That’s a fucking awesome time.”

“Oh,” Rust says. “Cool.”

After practice, everyone who doesn’t live near the school gets picked up by their parents except for the team captain, who has his own truck. Rust shoulders his backpack and is about to start walking home when Mr. Hart calls after him.

“Hey, I said I’d give you a ride home, remember?”

“Yeah,” Rust says, without looking him in the eye.

“Well, come on.”

Rust is tired enough that he doesn’t argue. He follows Mr. Hart to his car, and sits stiffly in the front passenger seat.

“So, where we headed?” Mr. Hart asks as he pulls out of the school parking lot. Rust describes the route to his house, and Mr. Hart nods.

“I got a buddy used to live down that way. Great place for fishing. You do much fishing?”

“Yessir. In Alaska.”

“Well, it can’t be much different here,” Mr. Hart says. “You should give it a try. You starting to get used to living down here?”

Rust looks out the window. Green vegetation grows right up against the side of the road, so thick that he can’t see the water beyond it. A breeze moves through the tops of the cypress trees and their long, drooping branches flutter towards the road, like a thousand ghostly fingers reaching out to strangle whoever dared to come and drain off the land and put a road here.

“This place is like somebody's memory of a town and the memory is fading,” Rust says slowly. “It's like there was never anything here but jungle.”

Rust doesn’t notice how Mr. Hart’s grip on the steering wheel tightens. They are silent until they reach Rust’s house. Mr. Hart parks the car on the street, then says, “So, you gonna be at practice on Thursday?”

“I guess so,” Rust says.

“There’s a form I’m supposed to get you to sign, if you want to be a member of the team. Supposed to get a parent and-or guardian to sign it, too. Is that gonna be a problem?” Mr. Hart asks kindly.

“Nossir,” Rust says. He figures he can just sign for his dad again. “So’s long as you don’t need a phone number.”

Mr. Hart glances at Rust. Rust freezes, realizing that he had unconsciously been picking at his arms. The older man clears his throat and looks away. “Well,” he says, digging around in the glove department for a pen and piece of paper. “Here’s my number. Just in case something, um, something comes up. If you need to call me or anyone, you can probably use the phone at the liquor store. Bobby, the guy who owns it, he’s a real nice guy. Helped me out more than once, that’s for sure.” He looks at Rust. Rust just takes the paper, and gets out of the car. He doesn’t want to know about Mr. Hart’s troubles anymore than he wants Mr. Hart to know about his.

Practice is held after school every other day. Darryl Roy owns the boombox, and the rest of the guys take turns bringing in tapes. Rust is introduced to Guns N Roses, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Gin Blossoms, and Nirvana. 

“We shouldn’t be doing this.” Rust gestures stiffly to the boombox and pile of tapes. It’s the second day of practice. Two days was all it took for his fear of bringing the g-men to his door to become greater than his fear of making an ass of himself in front of the team. 

“What the heck you talking about?” Darryl Roy asks as he stretches out on the grass.

“The government’s been using radio waves since the Second World War. Antennae pick them and broadcast them at frequencies too high to hear but they get in your skull anyway. The vibration patterns alter your brain composition, reducing what little free will was there to begin with until you’re just another of their pawns.”

Darryl Roy starts laughing. “Hey dudes, listen to this. Cohle’s afraid there’s satanic messages in rock ‘n’ roll! Preacher Cohle, guys!”

“I didn’t say that. And I ain’t no preacher,” Rust says curling his hands into fists.

“You a preacher’s son? Your daddy a man of God?” 

“My dad’s none of your goddamn business.” Rust instinctively shifts his stance, preparing to throw a punch. Suddenly, Mr. Hart is off the bleachers and between the guys.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Cool down, son,” Mr. Hart says. “The guys are just kidding with you, alright?” He slaps Rust on the back. Rust flinches. Mr. Hart keeps his hand on Rust’s shoulder and gently steers him away from the rest of the team. “Look, I know you got a lot of adjusting to do here, but trust me, listening to some screaming hippies with guitars ain’t gonna hurt you. Might make your daddy a little mad, but your daddy’s not here, right? So just chill out and try to be a normal kid, ok?”

Rust nods. Mr. Hart goes to slap Rust on the back again, then thinks better of it, and just awkwardly nods and heads back to the bleachers. That night, Rust lays in bed, alternately staring at the ceiling, listening as hard as he can for the sound of g-men sneaking into the house, and staring at the crucifix, trying to test his thoughts to prove that the government hasn’t twisted up his mind. He intends to keep watch the whole night, but he’s too tired and falls asleep. In the morning, he and his dad are still safe. Nothing happened. Rust watches his dad eat a bowl of cereal and leave for work and wonders if maybe his dad wasn’t just wrong about the radio waves. Maybe he was wrong about everything.

On the days they don’t have practice, Rust trains by himself. The push-ups and sit-ups are getting easier. He thinks he can feel himself getting stronger. He closes his eyes in the shower and visualizes the muscles in his legs, arms, and abdomin repairing themselves and growing from the stress he puts them through. Rust has never thought of himself as strong, but the act of breaking his body apart comes as naturally to him as breathing. 

 

Mr. Hart picks Rust up for the meet early Saturday morning. They drive through town and pick up a couple other of the guys and a box of donuts, then meet the rest of the team at the hosting school, on the other side of the county. Six different high school track teams are gathered, some with groups of supporting parents and friends. Their team is by far the smallest; Rust understands why Mr. Hart had been so invested in getting Rust on the team. Since it’s Rust’s first meet, he’s only competing in the three-mile run. 

“Are you nervous?” Mr. Hart asks.

“No,” Rust says. “It doesn’t matter who wins.”

“Well, don’t lose on purpose, ok?”

Rust nods, and then the starting gun goes off, and he loses himself in running.

Rust finishes in second place, which pushes the team into fourth place overall. They don’t medal, but Mr. Hart is still ecstatic that they didn’t come in last place, like they did at every meet last season. Rust is overwhelmed by the congratulations his teammates give him, slapping him on the back and high-fiving him. They blare the radio and pile into the back of Mr. Hart’s truck for the trip home.

“We’re having a party tonight at Darryl Roy’s,” A sprinter says as they’re pulling up to Rust’s house. “It’s gonna be sick. You better be there. There’s gonna be girls.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

Eddie, the team captain, says he’ll pick Rust up at eight, but he’ll have to get his own ride home. The other boys start in on Eddie, who apparently has been trying to hook up with a certain cheerleader since last year, and Rust leaves the truck unnoticed.

The front door is unlocked, so Rust knows his dad is probably home. Rust enters cautiously; his dad’s been a little on edge this week. He’s headed to the shower when his dad calls out from the kitchen.

“Rustin, that you? Come in here and give me a hand with this.”

Rust sighs but does as he’s told. The kitchen is dark. His father is standing on a stepladder, holding a sheet of aluminum siding against the window. 

“Just grab the drill and go ahead and put some screws in here. Come on,” he adds, when Rust hesitates.

“What’s this all about?” Rust asks as he plugs in the extension cord and connects it to the drill.

“This right here is solid aluminum sheet metal. The supply company screwed up the order and sent twice as much as we needed, so I got this. The boss was just gonna toss it in the dumpster, can you believe that?”

“Oh. It’s gonna be awful hard to see in here. Probably gonna trap a lot of heat, too.”

“Yeah, well, it’ll be a helluva lot harder for those damn spies to use their radar tracking devices, so don’t complain unless you want them keeping track of your every goddamn move and logging it in their records for the men in Washington-”

“I don’t think Spencer’s gonna be happy about this.” Rust says, in a pathetic last-ditch attempt to stop his father’s plan.

“I don’t give a fuck about Spencer, just hurry up with the damn drill already.”

Two hours later, each of the six windows in their house is boarded over with metal. It turns out the light in the bathroom doesn’t work, so Rust showers in the dark. He gets out and towels off his hair, then dresses and begins cooking dinner. It’s supposed to be his dad’s turn to cook, but his dad is still going around the house, banging on the metal sheets to ensure that they’re securely affixed to the window frames. Rust wants to grab his dad and tell him to fucking knock it off. Instead, Rust decides that he’ll go to Darryl Roy’s party. He’s got to get out of this goddamn house.

 

Rust doesn’t know how much he’s had to drink. All he knows is he was feeling good, real relaxed and warm and  _ nice _ , just sitting on the couch and hitting his head against the back cushion in time with the music because that felt real nice, too, and then some asshole’s telling him to move because he’s got a chick to bang and Rust is sitting on the only couch in the whole fucking basement. Rust looks up. He recognizes the dude as one of the kids who call themselves The Iron Crusaders, like they’re a real gang or some shit, just because they all ride motorbikes and snort coke, when they can get it, which is almost never. Rust doesn’t know his name. Everyone just calls him Ginger, on account of his patchy red beard. It takes a minute for Rust to process what Ginger is saying. It takes another minute for Rust to realize that the girl is so wasted she can’t stand up straight on her own. That’s plenty of time for Ginger to go from irritated to angry.

“Move your ass, faggot, or I’ll move it for you.” Ginger pushes the girl onto the other side of the couch. She moans and flops over the side, a thin dribble of puke hanging out her mouth. She looks dead, Rust thinks. All limp, like a chicken after you snap its neck. The nice warmth drains out of him.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he shouts at Ginger. “You can’t fuck a corpse! You can’t do it! You sick fucking bitch, you can’t fuck a corpse!”

“What the fuck, man? She’s my girlfriend, what the fuck is wrong with y _ ou _ ? Shut your gay-ass mouth!”

But Rust can’t shut up, now. The guy punches him in the face. Rust tries to fight back. His coordination is too impaired; he swings at the air and trips over someone else. The guy lands a second punch, in the solar plexus, and Rust hits the concrete floor so hard he blacks out. When he comes to, he hears someone telling someone else to call 911 because holy shit, they can’t feel her pulse, maybe Katie actually _is_ dead, and maybe that Cohle guy, too. Someone else hears ‘911’, thinks they’re getting busted for drinking, and takes off running. Soon everyone is trying to get out the backdoor. Rust lays on the floor until they’re all gone, even Katie, then pulls himself up and stumbles outside.

The cold night air doesn’t do much to sober him up. Rust staggers along the side of the road until he reaches a payphone. Then he calls the only phone number he has.

“Hello?” Mr. Hart says, not hiding the irritation in his voice. It’s a quarter to midnight, the girls are already asleep, and he was just about to join his wife upstairs for some much-needed time alone.

“Sorry Mr. Hart,” Rust says. “I’m sorry for calling so late but I--” He vomits into the receiver. 

“Alright, alright.” Mr. Hart rolls his eyes. Stupid goddamn kids. “Just tell me where you are.”

“Jesus, Rust, what happened?” Mr. Hart asks. He hauls Rust up off the curb and half-carries him around to the passenger seat.

“Look, I'd consider myself a realist, alright?” Rust slurs. “But in philosophical terms I'm what's called a pessimist.” 

“Uh, okay, what's that mean?” 

“Means I'm bad at parties, ” Rust says, then vomits onto the floor of the car. 

“Jesus christ. Lemme tell ya, you ain't great outside-a parties, either.” Mr. Hart stares at the mess for a minute, then decides it will be easier to clean up after he gets the kid home. “So what happened?” Mr. Hart asks as he starts the car. “Let me guess. You couldn’t keep your mouth shut, pissed someone off, and this time, instead of detention, you got your ass whupped?”

“More or less.”

Mr. Hart pulls up to the one stoplight in town and takes a closer look at Rust’s swollen face.

“Yep, that’s a helluva shiner you got there. But, uh, you know, you shouldn’t have called me. It’s not really… an appropriate teacher-student relationship. I mean, I’m glad you’re safe but call your daddy next time, ok?”

“My dad finds out I’m drunk, he’ll kill me.”

“Well, hell, if my little girl Audrey came home drunk out of her skull, I’d punish her, too. You know, you’re a good kid, Rust, but you done fucked up this time. ”

“Yeah right,” Rust says. “I’ve seen the way you look at your kid. You could never lay a hand on her.”

“Well, hell no, I’m not a - wait, hang on just a second here.” Marty rubs his temples. He’s supposed to be fucking his wife right now, not holding an intervention for a stupid, smart-ass teenager. Hell, being a gym teacher was supposed to be easy. “Rust, are you telling me your daddy’s been beating on you?” 

“None of your business what my dad does,” Rust slurs.

“Considering I’m the one responsible for your drunk ass right now, I’d say it is my business. Plus, I’m your coach.”

“Well, I quit the team.”

“You serious?”

“Yeah,” Rust says. “I quit. Fuck this. Fuck this world.”

“Alright, buddy,” Mr. Hart says, pulling up in front of Rust’s house. “This ain’t over. We’re gonna talk on Monday, when you’re sober. Now get out of my truck.” 

 

Rust wakes up on his bedroom floor late Sunday afternoon. His whole body aches and his head is pounding. His vision swims as he stands up, and he barely manages to get to the bathroom in time to throw up in the toilet. What happened? He can’t remember all of it, but definitely remembers that there was a dead girl and then Mr. Hart… Mr. Hart was there, for some reason. Maybe that was just a dream.   
  


“Dear students, teachers, and staff,” the high school principal says. The microphone screeches feedback. He waits a moment. The gymnasium is packed with students, and silent. Silent as the grave, Rust thinks. “We’re gathered here today to honor the life of one our beloved sophomore students, Katie Jessica LaVaughn. As some of you may have heard, several of our students were involved in a car accident early Sunday morning. To our great sadness, Katie’s neck was broken in the accident, and she passed away shortly after at the county hospital. While all of the details surrounding the accident are not yet clear, what is clear is that our community has lost a warm, vibrant young woman....”  
Ginger is openly crying, his eyes puffy and red as his beard. The students sitting around him look away, out of awkwardness or respect. Rust can’t think, can’t hardly breathe. What’s Ginger doing here. Last time he saw Ginger, Katie was dead. No, Katie died later. But Rust saw her dead, before it happened. He saw Katie’s broken neck. They’ll put make-up over the bruises to try and make it look like she’s just sleeping there in the coffin, but there’s no hiding those twisted and snapped tendons. He’s seen it before. He’ll see it again. He understands, now. Time is a flat circle.

 

Rust can’t remember the last time he slept. Sunday, after the party, he guesses, but when was that? When is now? He gets up, and goes to school, and comes home, as if in wrapped in a fog. In reality, nothing has ever been more clear. He understands, finally, the secret at the heart of everything. The whole story of humankind is just a snake eating itself. Everything that will happen is happening, has already happened and will happen again. Nietzsche came close to understanding but he didn’t see everything. Not the way Rust sees it. Rust sees through the loops in the moebius strip of history. 

Rust is surrounded by walking corpses that don’t even know they’re dead. Carrie Jane is furiously defending evolution to their biology teacher. How many times have they had this conversation? How many times has he sat here, and desperately tried to find a way to break the circle? He is counting, and pulling and picking at his skin. It’s not enough. He can’t breathe, so he screams.

 

Mr. Hart is waiting to meet with the principal -- the relative success of the track team this semester means they might be able to fit new hurdles into next year’s budget -- and flirting with the cute secretary outside the principal’s office when he sees a teacher bringing Rust in. Rust is sweating and wild-eyed, like a rabid dog, and the teacher looks as apprehensive as if he really was foaming at the mouth. 

“Hey there, son,” Mr. Hart says. He keeps his distance. “What’s going on?”

“Disorderly conduct, disrupting class - again.” The teacher says. 

“Well, uh, Quesada’s actually in a meeting right now, but I can keep an eye on Rust until he gets out?”

“Sure,” she says, handing him a half-filled out conduct violation form. “Give that to Quesada.”

Mr. Hart waits until she’s gone before he turns to Rust. The kid is silent and twitching like he’s tweaking out. His pupils aren’t dilated, though, and Rust doesn’t really seem like the type of kid to do drugs. Of course, you never knew - the tox report found coke in Katie’s blood, which surprised lot of folks who didn’t know she was sleeping with Ginger. Still, Mr. Hart is pretty sure Rust’s problems are psychological instead of pharmacological. 

“You’re not looking too good. You want to call your dad to come pick you up?”

Rust shakes his head. 

“Right. No phone. Hey, uh, listen, sweetheart,” Mr. Hart says to the secretary. “This kid is sick as a dog. I’m gonna drop him at home, okay?”  
“Sure thing,” she says, and makes a note in the attendance spreadsheet for the day.

“Thanks darling. Oh, and if Quesada gets out of that meeting, just tell him I’ll catch him later.”

Mr. Hart throws an arm around Rust, and steers the kid out of the building, across the parking lot, and into the passenger seat of his truck.

“You gonna be ok?” He asks the kid.

“I’m fine,” Rust says.  
“Well, you look like shit. Listen, my wife, Maggie, she’s a nurse. How’s about you let her check you out, and then I’ll take you back to your place. Just for the sake of my conscience.”  


Maggie isn’t happy to see her husband coming home in the middle of the day with a student but she’s not surprised, either. This is the man she married: a man who thinks his judgement is infallible, even when he’s made a dozen more troubles by trying to do the right thing. She quickly takes Rust’s pulse and feels for a temperature, more for Marty’s ease than anything else. The boy’s problems are clearly psychological. She pours Rust a glass of water and sends him to sit in the living room where the baby is sleeping while she and Marty whisper in the hallway. She wants to chide him for not contacting the boy’s father first of all, but Marty probably has his reasons, and there’s no use in bringing it up now, anyway.

“What exactly is your plan here, Marty? As far as I can tell, Rustin is currently experiencing a psychotic break. He’s probably going to need long-term health care, therapy, I don’t even know what.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think-”  
Of course you didn’t, Maggie thinks, but she bites her tongue.  

Suddenly, Macie wakes up and begins to cry. Maggie goes to her. Rust is nowhere to be seen.

“Marty, get in here!”  
After a moment of panicked searching, Marty finds Rust balled up - knees against chest, chin against knees, and arms wrapped round tight - in the corner behind the sofa.

“What the hell, son? What the hell are you doing here?”

“What happens after you die, Mr. Hart?”

“Well, uh, I don’t know,” Marty says. He glances at Maggie. She’s soothing Macie. Marty stoops down and sits on the carpet next to Rust. “I guess it depends on what you believe. Heaven or hell, I guess, or maybe just a whole lotta nothing.” 

“For eternity.”

“I guess so.”

“In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes. So death created time to grow the things that it would kill.” Everything makes sense now. Dora and Katie and everything. “And you are reborn but into the same life that you've always been born into. I mean, how many times have we had this conversation, Mr. Hart? When you can't remember your lives, you can't change your lives, and that is the terrible and the secret fate of all life. You're trapped... like a nightmare you keep waking up into.”

Marty doesn’t want to hear any more of this. It’s starting to freak him out, like the kid’s really gone psycho. But seeing Rust trying to hold back tears evokes a parental compassion in Marty. Instinctively, he puts his arms around the teenager’s shoulders and pulls him close.

“Rust. Rustin, listen, son. Maggie and I, we’re gonna help you work this thing out. I’m gonna talk to your dad-”

“You can go over there if you want,” Rust says. “Hell, even call the cops. It won’t make a damn bit of difference. My dad’s never gonna get better. And I’m never gonna -- I’m gonna keep -- I don’t know what I’m gonna do, but I held your sleeping baby, Mr. Hart - I held Audrey and I saw myself putting my hands on her little neck. She wouldn’t hardly struggle, and then she’d be gone and I don’t know if I hate myself cause I wanted to kill her or cause I couldn’t do it. I lack the constitution to set her free, make it so she wouldn’t have to deal with the bullshit in this fucked up world. I saw Katie die, you know that? I saw her die before it happened but I saw it happen because she’s always dying and being reborn just so she can die again and I don’t want that, Mr. Hart. I don’t want to live in a world like that.”

Marty doesn’t know what to say. He just holds Rust as the teenager begins to sob.

 

Rust does not believe that a person must break before they can get better. In Alaska, Rust and his father would repair the house, all their supplies, and the truck. If anything looked even slightly worn, they fixed it. Better to fix something then, when they could, then wait til it was the middle of winter and the truck wasn’t starting or the roof caved in from weakened beams and the weight of snow. But, he accepts, sometimes fissure cracks build up inside a length of wood, and no one knows the beam needs fixing until it snaps. And sometimes termites get in and eat away so’s that a plank that looks stable crumbles if you put any weight on it at all. And you can’t blame the wood for any of that.  
Marty holds Rust until Rust stops crying, then shows him to the bathroom where he can wash his face. Rust stays for dinner, and then Marty drives him home. Maggie tries to ask questions --  gentle, prodding questions -- but neither Rust nor Marty say anything, and the baby needs looking to, so she doesn’t get far at all. Rust figures she’s the one who calls in an anonymous tip that leads a social worker stops by his house a few days later. Rust’s dad doesn’t trust the social worker, of course, but she gives Rust a card with a bunch of numbers to call, in case he needs it. Rust memorizes the numbers. He can handle his dad by himself, yet there is a quiet sense of safety that comes from knowing he doesn’t have to.

Slowly, everything gets better except the goddamn heat. By March, it’s over seventy every day. Rust doesn’t rejoin the track team. He doesn’t hate himself so much that he would willingly run miles every afternoon in the blazing sun. Instead, he runs in the quiet coolness of early morning, a bodily mediation to strengthen him for the day ahead.

There is an expression Rust learns in French class -  _ la plus ça change, la plus ça ne change pas _ . The more things change, the more they stay the same. Rust continues to spend most Friday afternoons in detention with Mr. Hart. Usually Mr. Hart just reads his fishing and gun magazines, but when it’s just him and Rust, they sometimes talk. They have nothing in common, except that they’re both not sure what they’re doing, and trying to figure things out. Rust thinks it is strange, but good, to know that he doesn’t have to have everything in life figured out by the time he turns eighteen.

One week, in May, Carrie Jane and Rust have detention together, on account of responding to a government class assignment on “America’s Shining Legacy” with a presentation on the history of state-sponsored eugenics. (Rust is realizing that his dad is wrong about a lot of things, but not everything, and Nietzsche is right about a lot of things, but not everything.) During detention, Carrie Jane passes him a note asking him to the spring formal. He writes back, yes. Turns out neither of them own formal clothes, so they end up going to the diner instead, where they drink coffee and talking about books all night. Carrie Jane is sweet and smart. Her hands are soft. When she touches him with those soft hands, there’s no room in Rust’s mind for thoughts about girls with broken necks. Rust knows things will get worse again. In the fullness of time, he will die and be reborn and suffer through this again and again. But for now, things are better.


End file.
